Kickoff For October 7, 2024
While I still don't have access to the internet at my new home (that will be changing soon), I've found a way to send this edition of The Kickoff to your inbox. Wish I could say that my solution is clever or innovative, but that's not the case.
With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:
The Bug in the Computer Bug Story — Wherein we learn that perhaps the idea of a bug (in the context of technology) didn't originate from an insect found in a computer in 1947, but was around for decades before that incident.
From the article:
The real bug in this narrative, as Shapiro points out, is that “bug” in this sense actually goes back to the late nineteenth century. The Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary’s fourth definition of the noun “bug” reads “a defect or fault in a machine, plan, or the like.”
50 Years Later: Remembering How the Future Looked in 1974 — Wherein we dip into the wasn't the future wonderful files and get a glimpse at how various thinkers envisioned the world today on the pages of Saturday Review, with some of those predictions being pretty close to reality while others are way off the mark.
From the article:
Maybe that can serve as the magazine’s final message to our generation: that in the end, the future remains impossible to predict.
But at least we step into our future with 50 more years of progress — and failures — upon which to build.
How Singer Won the Sewing Machine War — Wherein we learn how the company, through strategic alliances and shrewd marketing and sales strategies, came to dominate the market for sewing machines not just in the textile industry but in homes.
From the article:
The company expanded the practice of door-to-door sales, in part because the hire-purchase plan required canvassers to collect weekly payments, but which also allowed salesmen to bring the product into prospective customers’ homes, and show them how such a novel machine could simplify their lives.
‘Illegal’ spies: The Kremlin’s secret tool in its war against the West — Wherein we dip a toe into the world of real-life deep cover agents, ones who literally become other people in other nations, and who have been a fixture of Russian (and before that Soviet) intelligence for decades.
From the article:
A fundamental espionage tool in the era of the Soviet Union, illegal spies have never ceased to be part of Moscow’s playbook in its war against the West. Kremlinologists believe that Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was a spy in the Soviet KGB and later head of its successor agency, the FSB, revitalized the program and has always held special respect for such operatives.
Sunk cost — Wherein we wade into the world of crypto and NFTs (remember them?), and learn about the rise and messy decline of a startup called OpenSea which became the biggest marketplace for digital tchotchke.
From the article:
OpenSea looked like it was becoming mainstream, but the fires wouldn’t go out. Shortly after Hollander, OpenSea’s current CTO, joined the company, his team found a serious vulnerability in the company’s code that would allow an attacker to receive money for an NFT without sending it to the victim.
How easy is it to fudge your scientific rank? Meet Larry, the world’s most cited cat — Wherein we learn how two researchers drew attention to so-called citation mills to highlight the problem in academe of how easy it is to manipulate research metrics to gain clout in a field.
From the article:
The citations, it turned out, often belonged to papers full of nonsense text authored by long-dead mathematicians such as Pythagoras. The studies had been uploaded as PDFs to the academic social platform ResearchGate and then subsequently deleted, obscuring their nature.